sympathy
with them in the woman-part of his nature which Goethe ascribes to the
highest genius; but, putting aside that "monster," I do not remember any
English poet whom we should consider conspicuously eminent in that lore,
unless it be the prose poet, nowadays generally underrated and little
read, who wrote the letters of Clarissa Harlowe. I say all this in
vindication of Graham Vane, if, though a very clever man in his way,
and by no means uninstructed in human nature, he had utterly failed in
comprehending the mysteries which to this poor woman-child seemed to
need no key for one who really loved her. But we have said somewhere
before in this book that music speaks in a language which cannot explain
itself except in music. So speaks, in the human heart, much which is
akin to music. Fiction (that is, poetry, whether in form of rhyme or
prose) speaks thus pretty often. A reader must be more commonplace
than, I trust, my gentle readers are, if he suppose that when Isaura
symbolized the real hero of her thoughts in the fabled hero of her
romance, she depicted him as one of whom the world could say, "That is
Graham Vane." I doubt if even a male poet would so vulgarize any woman
whom he thoroughly reverenced and loved. She is too sacred to him to
be thus unveiled to the public stare; as the sweetest of all ancient
love-poets says well--

"Qui sapit in tacito gaudeat ille sinu."

But a girl, a girl in her first untold timid love, to let the world
know, "that is the man I love and would die for!"--if such a girl be,
she has no touch of the true woman-genius, and certainly she and Isaura
have nothing in common. Well, then, in Isaura's invented hero, though
she saw the archetypal form of Graham Vane,--saw him as in her young,
vague, romantic dreams idealized, beautified, transfigured,--he would
have been the vainest of men if he had seen therein the reflection of
himself. On the contrary he said, in the spirit of that jealousy to
which he was too prone, "Alas! this, then, is some ideal, already seen
perhaps, compared to which how commonplace am I!" and thus persuading
himself, no wonder that the sentiments surrounding this unrecognized
archetype appeared to him over-romantic. His taste acknowledged the
beauty of form which clothed them; his heart envied the ideal that
inspired them. But they seemed so remote from him; they put the
dreamland of the writer farther and farther from his workday real life.

In this fr